ADL report finds Steam is ‘rife’ with racist posts and images

[Pelican Press 0]

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ADL report finds Steam is ‘rife’ with ******* posts and images

Valve’s Steam store is more than just a place to buy computer games online. It’s an active community of gamers. Unfortunately, a sizable portion of those gamers are posting an “unprecedented” amount of hateful, ******* and anti-Semetic content on the gaming site’s cyber social gathering place Steam Community, according to a report from the

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The organization found 1.83 million unique pieces of “extremist or hateful content” from 1.5 million unique users in 73,824 groups. The content included “explicitly anti-Semitic symbols” and “tens of thousands of instances” of users showing support for foreign ********** groups. The online gaming community even included an alarming number of “copypastas,” more than half of which were variations of ***** swastikas.

ADL

The report also found a “significant number” of Steam avatars with hateful symbols. Investigators uncovered 827,758 users with extremist or *******-signaling avatar images including the cartoon character Pepe the Frog in ***** regalia or adorned with stereotypical tropes and looks, swastikas, the white supremacist skull or “siege” mask and the ***** Eagle. Another 15,129 avatars contained images of flags, emblems or logos of ********** groups, the majority of which referred to the jihadist group ISIS.

The ADL even uncovered images that “glorify violent extremists” and violent hate *******. The report found references to and stills from tragedies like the 2019 Christchurch, New Zealand ********* and the stabbing of five people in Eskisehir, Turkey committed by an 18 year old wearing neo-***** imagery.

Even the “Collections” and “Mods” community on the gamer gathering site contained hundreds of mods that contained hateful imagery. An unidentified user named after the Christchurch shooter Brian Tarrant took the Valve physics sandbox game Garry’s Mod and made the “*********** S**poster collection.” The user recreated Tarrant’s body armor look and posted screenshots implying the character is ******** Muslims just as Tarrant did in 2019.

ADL

Other users utilized the Garry’s Mod game to create maps that also celebrated tragedies like the Columbine High School ********* and the Tops supermarket white supremacist ********* in Buffalo. The maps inspired even more ******* comments and reactions such as “make synagogue next” and “remember labs, subscribe to PewDiePie,” a chilling reference to a comment Tarrant made on a livestream just before he committed his *********.

The ADL accused Valve, Steam’s owner, of not taking enough action to remove or curb the use of these images in its communities. The report claims Valve has a “highly permissive approach to content policy” and only took action “in rare notable cases.”

“Steam has selectively removed extremist content, largely based around extremist groups publicized in reporting or in response to government pressure,” the ADL report says. “However, this has been largely ad hoc, with Valve failing to systematically address the issue of extremism and hate on the platform.”

We’ve reached out to Valve for a comment on the ADL’s report.

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#ADL #report #finds #Steam #rife #******* #posts #images

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